Beyond Belief

"Spirit is all-knowing; this precludes the need of believing. Mere belief is blindness without Principle." -- Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; Page 487, Lines 15 & 22

"It is, then, only your wish to change reality that is fearful, because by your wish you think you have accomplished what you wish. When you maintain that there must be an order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would withhold from Truth. You believe Truth cannot deal with them only because you would keep them from Truth." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 17, Section I, 2:1 & 3:1-2

The seeming power of belief is a highly extolled and hotly debated issue in the world. The definition of belief is "assent to the truth of something offered for acceptance." This implies that we can believe anything is true or false, based on the evidence. Our criminal justice system is a good example of that. True or false? Right or wrong? This way or that way? Is he telling the truth or is he lying? The answer is what we believe. And we believe we can believe wrongly.

Remember in the last blog we talked about Principle, the unchanging, unmovable Truth that is the Source of everything. The realization that this is beyond belief is our first glimmer of awakening. That there is Being, utterly natural and unchanging, complete in all aspects, whole and perfect and infinite... and that this Being is Source and Substance of all that IS... and that this Truth is the Principle that shines through all true spirituality... this is beyond belief. It can't be believed. But it can be known. It can be experienced directly, as we let go of all relative beliefs and stories. This is what A Course in Miracles calls the act of forgiveness, our only truly active function in this world of many-storied dreams.

The process is usually gradual. There are exceptions of course, like Byron Katie's experience of seemingly instantaneous shedding of all stories and beliefs, leaving her as innocent as a newborn baby. She had to acquire the ability to live in the stories again, but this time without believing them. She now knows from direct experience that Who We Are is beyond belief.

For the rest of us, the shedding of stories and belief systems and identities, which are all fictional, is a gradual process. We learn to live in the stories of our lives, even in the belief systems and identities, without mistaking them for Who We Are. We learn to forgive and release every single aspect (whether it seems good or bad) to the Holy Spirit, the eternal and Awakened Voice within each of us, to be used within the dream of Awakening for all. And every single story, every belief, every identity will then have served its only true purpose. For this is a dream of Awakening to Self. And that is most definitely beyond belief.

"You cannot be faithful to two masters who ask conflicting things of you. What you use in fantasy you deny to Truth. Yet what you give to Truth to use for you is safe from fantasy." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 17, Section I, 2:4-5